Archive for ‘Drugs’

I have this book called The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and it’s full of this beautiful and disturbing raw poetry. Here’s one of my favorites out of it. The very ending is near and dear to my heart.

Scab Maids on Speed

My first job was when I was about fifteen. I’d met a girl named Hope who became my best friend. Hope and I were flunking math so we became speed freaks. This honed our algebra skills and we quickly became whiz kids. For about five minutes. Then, our brains started to fry and we were just teenage speed freaks.

So we decided to seek gainful employment.

We got hired as part time maids at the Holiday Inn while a maid strike was happening. We were scab maids on speed and we were coming to clean your room.

We were subsequently fired for pilfering a Holiday Inn guest’s quaalude stash which we did only because we never thought someone would have the nerve to call the front desk and say, THE MAIDS STOLE MY LUUDES MAN. But someone did – or so we surmised – because we were fired.

I suppose maybe we were fired because we never actually CLEANED but rather just turned on the vacuum so it SOUNDED like we were cleaning as we picked the pubic hairs off the sheets and out of the tub then passed out on the bed and caught up on the sleep we missed from being up all night speeding.

When we got fired, we became waitresses at an International House of Pancakes.

We were much happier there.

— Maggie Estep

The funny part is mine was Waffle House. I was friends with all the methheads at the IHOP across the street though, too. The stupidity of youth.